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Why didn't St Louis, Cleveland and Detroit annex and expand their city like Indianapolis, Columbus, Houston, Jacksonville, Nashville, Charlotte, Louisville and Oaklahoma City have been able to? Indianapolis was a Rust Belt City but it seems to be doing pretty good as one of the fastest growing big cities in the Midwest.
St. Louis left St. Louis County via the Great Divorce of 1876. That means that the city is a separate and independent municipality from all of its adjacent suburbs in St. Louis County. Different police, courts, etc. This means St. Louis had, and still has, no ability to start annexing when it hit its political boundaries in the early 20th century.
It's also not hard to see where people fleeing the city went. St. Louis County's population increased by approximately 550k from 1950 to 1970. I wonder where all of those people came from...
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Originally Posted by jjbradleynyc
I voted St Louis.
St Louis had such a promising first half of the 20th century, and a massive city population in 1950 of 856,000.
Flash forward to 2020, and St Louis is struggling with crime, continued population decimation, and urban blight. With its population just below 300,000 today, St Louis is a shell of what it was 70 years ago.
Such huge potential, but it has fallen far from what it could be.
Just above 300k, not below. Give that another year or so.
But yes, we get the point. Also it should be that it's still struggling with its issues. It's not like they're new.
That being said, the city is seemingly about to finally round the corner. I wouldn't have moved back had the momentum not been coming back. Here's hoping St. Louis is able to weather the upcoming economic storm.
Kansas City 1950: 456,622 - 80.2 sq mi
Kansas City 1970: 507,087 - 316.3 sq mi
Kansas City 2019: 495,327 - 314.95 sq mi
Kansas City hid its true decline by annexing its inner ring and taking its fleeing tax base back. It's very evident that Kansas City hit its urban peak in 1950 like all of these other cities. Between 1950 and 1970 it quadrupled in land area. The fact that it doesn't even have 40k more people from when it was one quarter the footprint it is now is quite telling. I agree that it does appear to be doing better than these other cities at a metro level, but as for being more sunbelt I would say that it's a bit of a fraud in that regard.
If these other cities had been able to annex their inner rings the way KC did, their stories over the last 60 years would be very different, and this thread likely wouldn't exist.
I do agree it's on the fence, but most maps of rust belt states/cities exclude Kansas City, and pretty much anything south/west of St Louis. KC never lost as big an industry like Flint and Detroit lost most of the auto industry, and Gary lost the steel industry.
It's probably more pseudo-sunbelt, like Columbus or Indianapolis. But id doesn't feel like it can be compared well to the older, industrial Great Lakes/Northeastern cities like Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Detroit, and Milwaukee.
But as far as recent times, KC and the KC area has been steadily growing at a healthy rate for quite some time now. There have been declines in the past, but those times are quickly being over-shadowed by its recent growth. Compared to these other cities, which continue to face various problems in terms of growth to this day.
I feel that the MO side of STL metro reached its full potential, just earlier than what is typical for a legacy city. After all, it had TWO MLB teams during that sport's heyday like Chicago, Philadelphia, and Boston (NYC of course had three). It had a big World's Fair in 1904, and it still had a nice central location between points east, west, and south regarding trade. It was one of 12 cities chosen by the Fed over a century ago with a central Fed Bank branch that it holds to this day. It had a nationally renown arts/culture scene with jazz, ragtime, blues, as well as fine arts. It was unfortunate in that it was perhaps the first major city to suffer from the affects of redlining, blockbusting, and white flight, basically as early as the 1930s when the inner suburbs of St. Louis County were still streetcar-based. The IL side, not so much. The opening of the Eads Bridge was sort of its Brooklyn Bridge moment, but even at its peak, downtown ESL was nothing more than a small retail center, and this side never really got the typical big city benefits like employment, and what industry it had has never been replaced.
This is underselling East St. Louis when it was at its prime. It was a city of 82,000 people, making it one of the largest in Illinois, with a vibrant downtown with its own highrises, the courts for the Southern District of Illinois, etc.
Yes, 82,000 back in 1950 made it 1/10 of St. Louis' size, but it wasn't minuscule either. It was easily the second largest city in the metro area.
I do agree it's on the fence, but most maps of rust belt states/cities exclude Kansas City, and pretty much anything south/west of St Louis. KC never lost as big an industry like Flint and Detroit lost most of the auto industry, and Gary lost the steel industry.
It's probably more pseudo-sunbelt, like Columbus or Indianapolis. But id doesn't feel like it can be compared well to the older, industrial Great Lakes/Northeastern cities like Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Detroit, and Milwaukee.
But as far as recent times, KC and the KC area has been steadily growing at a healthy rate for quite some time now. There have been declines in the past, but those times are quickly being over-shadowed by its recent growth. Compared to these other cities, which continue to face various problems in terms of growth to this day.
Does anyone happen to have an idea of how KCMO metro population growth has been spread across both Kansas and Missouri? I was under the impression that Kansas' overall share was increasing at the expense of Missouri's, but I could be mistaken.
In St. Louis, Missouri's population share is increasing at the expense at Illinois'.
St. Louis and Baltimore both became independent entities. In the case of St. Louis it is an artificially constrained municipality but most people there and in the 95+ fiefdom municipalities that surround it see that limitation as what it is and identify with the city in most of the ways that matter. After WW2 the city footprint had taken over all that it could. The post war housing shortage for returning soldiers and their families had to be remedied by creating a checkerboard of housing developments in the more agricultural county. Until the fall of 1953 our family of four lived in one room in my grandma's house. We moved that year to a subdivision out among the corn and wheat fields. That was Leave-it-to-Beaver land. Then came the interstate freeways because there were so many people commuting to downtown every day. That caused even more out migration. The city has only itself to blame for cutting off its nose to spite its face. City residents were too cheap to help pay for county infrastructure in the 1870s and smugly split in a foolhardy assumption that they would be just fine with what they had.
The city population within those 1876 limits is and has declined but there is an infrastructure that takes the broader city into consideration...not fool proof but functional for a large city. I noted recently that some of those deserted and cleared areas are being redeveloped inside the old city limits.
St. Louis, Cleveland and Detroit would be much better cities today if they weren't surrounded by suburbs on 3 sides and a Great Lake or Big River on the other. Those suburbs around all those towns should have been annexed into their core city way back in the day. Most of those suburbs owe their very existence to their core city. The ones who had the money, left the city for the suburbs leaving the city with a high population of residents of mostly low income people who require social services and government assistence and no one to pay for it.
Why didn't St Louis, Cleveland and Detroit annex and expand their city like Indianapolis, Columbus, Houston, Jacksonville, Nashville, Charlotte, Louisville and Oaklahoma City have been able to? Indianapolis was a Rust Belt City but it seems to be doing pretty good as one of the fastest growing big cities in the Midwest.
Another consideration is that St. Louis (and to a lesser extent Detroit) never really got into the skyscraper game in a meaningful way.
People can say they don't matter, what about European cities, etc.
Bottom line is that during that time period, if you're trying to put NYC or Chicago on notice you better be building some tall buildings. Pittsburgh and Cleveland at least started on this path, and their towers today stand as monuments to two places who weren't going to settle for being middle tier cities without a fight.
I also voted Cincy as it seemed on a very clear path to being an inland rival to NYC and then never even hit 10,000 ppsm. Its also interesting to note that outside of the U.S., inland river cities continue to easily maintain dominance over ocean coast cities.
Sure but that ignores the radically different history’s of the US and Europe that drive the difference in city distributions.
Land expansion is one of the secrets of success for many fast growing Sunbelt cities as they grew in the mid/late 20th Century boom years through new suburbanization, but Kansas City is one of the few examples that I can think of that leveraged it as a mechanism to stop the bleeding.
There are other examples, though none quite as stark as Kansas City
Toledo 1950: 303,616 - 38.3 sq mi
Toledo 2019: 272,919 - 80.69 sq mi
Grand Rapids 1950: 176,515 - 23.4 sq mi
Grand Rapids 2019: 201,013 - 44.4 sq mi
I think one of the most eye popping examples is Birmingham:
Birmingham 1950: 326,037 - 65.3 sq mi
Birmingham 2019: 209,403 - 146.07 sq mi
Even Atlanta has experienced more land growth, than population growth over the last 70 years. Which I think showcases how wide spread the decentralization of the cities in this country really was from the 1950's-80s. Though it is obviously not a peer of the cities within the context this discussion.
Atlanta 1950: 331,314 - 36.9 sq mi
Atlanta 2019: 506,811- 133.15 sq mi
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Perhaps Louisville is another such example? It bled for decades following its peak in 1960 until it consolidated and bumped up its population in the early 2000s through consolidation. Maybe Nashville is an example, though it's sort of a hybrid that's living somewhere between a legacy city and a Sunbelt boom city IMO.
Louisville is a good example of this. Consolidation has definitely deluded the several decades of decline it experienced. Though I'd argue that Jacksonville was really the pioneer for this. Between the 1950 and 60 census it was also experiencing population decline within the 30 sq mi that comprised its original core. It set the model that places like Indianapolis (which had also started experiencing core declines) took up after.
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FWIW, and similar to its city limits, KC's CSA is also enormous in land area relative to its population. I'd love to see a resource that shows what Census population was back to 1900 (and each subsequent decade) for the current land areas associated with our current MSAs and CSAs. I bet that data would tell a fascinating story.
This is something that can be done. At one point I had actually compiled the data for several csa/msa's for this very reason. Though it was lost during a cloud migration (thank you onedrive). I plan to start this again at some point.
Why didn't St Louis, Cleveland and Detroit annex and expand their city like Indianapolis, Columbus, Houston, Jacksonville, Nashville, Charlotte, Louisville and Oaklahoma City have been able to? Indianapolis was a Rust Belt City but it seems to be doing pretty good as one of the fastest growing big cities in the Midwest.
They couldn't have. The one thing all three of those cities had in common was that before (in some cases long before) the 1950's, their borders were land locked, and completely surrounded by other incorporated cities. Pretty much anywhere in the country once a plot of land has been incorporated and chartered into a city, it cannot be legally absorbed into another entity without the consent of its residents. The only option is merger by way of voting, not annexation. Since the majority of those suburbs were chartered for the sole purpose of preventing annexation, a merger could probably happen only with state intervention.
Cleveland actually did annex/merge with a lot of its present day borders. I think the entire west side of the city came into city limits through mergers or annexation. Ohio City, for example, was a seperate city that competed with Cleveland early on before Cleveland became the more dominant of the two and Ohio City merged with Cleveland around the Civil War. The rest of the west side was a part of either Brooklyn or Rockport Township, most of which were incorporated, but Lakewood (Rockport) and Brooklyn city and Brooklyn Heights became their own cities/village.
On the Eastside, a large part of the city was originally Newburgh, East Cleveland and Warrensville township.
But when the area really exploded in population a lot of the neighborhoods being built in the townships immediately incorporated thus blocking Cleveland from annexing because Ohio law only allows a city to annex unincorporated land. That was all way before my time but I'm guessing that Cleveland really wasn't concerned with snatching up rural township land because it was growing so rapidly in the 75 square miles in its borders. But then when the population began to suburbanize, it was too late because all those areas immediately incorporated as soon as houses started to be built, using the city's street grid and tapping into the city's water.
Maybe someone who knows more about this can correct me if I'm wrong, but the city of Columbus did a better job of protecting its water lines. Cleveland allowed these, what are basically extension Cleveland neighborhoods that went on their own, contract to tap into the city's lines. Where as in Columbus only areas to get city water services if they were annexed into the city. That is I believe why you don't have 80 to 90 different incorporated areas in Franklin County and why the city of Columbus was able to continue to annex land throughout the county and even into neighboring Delaware County.
But people are now so fixated on arbitrary municipal boundaries and it makes it appear that Cleveland went from 900,000 pus down to 380,000. Really it should have maxed out at 1.5 or 1.6 million and still be over the 1 million mark in about 200-250 square miles.
A good example to look at are the numbered streets, which is based of Cleveland's street plan. On the westside, W. 179th is the last one in the city on Lorain Road. But they continue out to W. 232nd (through Fairview Park and into North Olmsted). The eastside is even crazier. E. 185th Street is the border of Cleveland/Euclid. The numbered streets go all the way out to E. 367th on the far end of Eastlake in Lake County.
Last edited by ClevelandBrown; 07-02-2020 at 09:40 PM..
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